How Search Discovers a Title of a PDF

In many cases, some or all of the articles in your collections are PDFs. Most PDFs have a visual title, which is a string of text on the first page that most readers would recognize as the title, for example Mobile Phone User Manual or How to Read a Stock Report.

However, not every visual title is that easy to spot. There may be many lines of text on the first page, or maybe no text at all. So how does Search determine the visual title to match to a search request?

Search uses the automatic PDF title discovery feature to determine PDF titles. It finds the visual title of a PDF automatically and uses it for title matching and as the search result title. A key advantage to the title discovery feature is you don't have to perform any additional authoring to provide the best search result title.

The title discovery evaluates the PDF for visual factors, such as:

The size of the font. Usually the larger text on a first page denotes a title.
The position of the text, for example, the first few sentences of the PDF.
The phrase length and distance between lines of the text.

For example, this string of text appears on the first page of a PDF:

ORACLE [Font Size 28, Bold]

User Guide [Font Size 18, Bold]

Version 1.1 [Font Size 18]

This user guide describes the use of knowledge applications. [Font Size 14]

Most users wouldn't read this string of text as:

Oracle, or
Version 1.1, or
This user guide describes the use of knowledge applications.

But they would read this text as:

Oracle User Guide or User Guide
Oracle User Guide Knowledge Management or User Guide Knowledge Management
Oracle User Guide Knowledge Management Version 1.1 or User Guide Knowledge Management Version 1.1

So in this example, the PDF title discovery finds that the best visual titles for search accuracy are User Guide Knowledge Management Version 1.1 or Oracle User Guide Knowledge Management OSvC 18. This automatic title feature eliminates any additional authoring on your part to find and provide the best search result titles.

You can edit or change existing PDF titles with more meaningful titles. For more information on editing a title, see Edit a Generated Document Title

Note: The visual title of a PDFs displays as a search results title after the full content processing cycle is completed.

What if there’s no title?

The automatic PDF title discovery feature may encounter PDFs that have no title at all. If it can’t find a visual title to assign to a PDF, it selects one of the following as a search result title:

The title in the PDF's properties, if a properties title is defined.
The PDF's file name.